Bizarre Curriculum

From talking to other medics it seems like the curriculum varies drastically from medical school to medical school over clinical years.

Being a loyal person, I'm usually the first to defend everything about my medical school except for the poor admin issues. I've spent hours spouting to other medic friends about how the curriculum at my uni is great in comparison to some of theirs as we have set times to discover all different specialities in 4th year after covering the basics of medicine and surgery in 3rd year.

Today I'm not feeling so hot about it. This is because of geriatrics. We have a relatively long placement in geriatrics, and although it's very important I just feel that the time could be better managed. A large part of my gastro/endo/gen med placement was geriatrics, as was neurology in 3rd year. It seems as if now we're going over the same ideas on capacity, support at home and assessing function that we did then.

I may be biased because I'm not loving geriatrics. I feel much more comfortable at the other end of the spectrum with paediatrics. Even taking my personal bias out of the picture surely it would be better to involve us with more clinical, history taking and diagnostic skills surrounding general medicine while highlighting the issues of elderly care rather than spending hours going over the same information about falls and delirium?

It would also be nice to have some more time doing specialities such as ENT, that we only had a couple of days for, and dermatology that seems to be lumped in with other things?

I feel like having a good old moan about everything today and the curriculum isn't all I'm irritated with, the weather is too. This morning the sunshine woke me up at 5.11am by streaming in my window. I was tired, but pleased the sun was shining. Then as soon as I left at 8 the sun vanished leaving me to freeze all day. Unimpressed. I'm trying really hard not to turn on the heating as my gas consumption is already higher than last year, but it's sooo tempting.

Lily xXx